Rasmus Bøgebjerg:
Young Naked Woman Writing
(1893)

This week’s Comeuppance Stories found me tracing the arc of Obsolescence across its earliest stages. I considered how Obsolescence almost always begins with innocent or ignorant overreach in StagesOfObsolescence, and then followed our incumbent’s futile ChasingGreatness into the void where achievement cannot follow ambition. I explored the NegativeSpaces his non-administration reliably produces, examined the PatentPolitics that zombie supplement culture made possible, watched the wealthiest man in the world spend half a billion dollars on losing candidates in WealthyWisdom, and concluded with our incumbent’s entirely predictable Denial in the wake of Tuesday’s historic midterm rebuke. It has been a momentous week.

Thank you for following along.

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Weekly Writing Summary

StagesOfObsolescence
“It’s tough to maintain decorum under those sorry conditions.”

Obsolescence almost always begins with innocent overreach.

I traced the first stage of Obsolescence through our incumbent’s term, arguing that what once fell naturally within his grasp can no longer be held. He assumed stewardship of an economic miracle and blew it on candy and gum. The tariffs that began the explicit disintegration weren’t strategy so much as compulsion. His proclamations now waver between unbelievable and absurd. The seat of his well-tailored pants holds the outline of his industrial-strength adult diaper, and he’s the last one to notice.
Hans Baldung: Group of Seven Horses (1534)

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ChasingGreatness
“Nobody, other than a dwindling cadre of his truest believers and a whole bunch of clueless billionaires, will ever believe another word he says.”

Alexander the Great never chased his greatness. His greatness chased him.

I explored the great misunderstanding at the heart of our incumbent’s project: greatness cannot be conventionally chased or conquered. Those who attract followers in pursuit of ChasingGreatness have proven themselves history’s most dangerous characters. As everything he touched turned to something other than gold just as the midterms arrived, his insistence that he’d achieved greatness grew louder and less convincing in equal measure.

Unknown Artist: The battle at Issus in 333 BC: Alexander the Great of Macedonia is chasing the fleeing Darius III. Coloured etching. (Unknown)

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NegativeSpaces
“…if it focuses upon NegativeSpaces, it reliably produces only Obsolescence…”

Where does an arrow land when launched toward a negative space?

I examined our incumbent’s administration’s obsession with dismantling rather than building, eliminating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse — the Three Horsemen of Obsolescence — without specifying what might replace them. NegativeSpaces' objectives reliably produce their opposites: DOGE’s war on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse produced more of each. Focus on what you don’t want, and that’s precisely what you’ll see. The next budding authoritarian who campaigns exclusively against things will also produce exactly what he promised to eliminate.

Ira Blount: A black cat looks up at a dragonfly fluttering above its head in this black-and-white, cut paper silhouette.(2009)

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PatentPolitics
“…a society founded on equality and hopefulness rather than Patent Medicine Cynicism.”

Those who thought the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act put an end to Snake Oil have a few more thoughts coming.

I traced the kinship between the supplement industrial complex and PatentPolitics: neither requires proof of efficacy to command a following. Trickle-down Economics has never once been observed working in this world, yet it remains a baseline conservative tenet. Supplement manufacturers substantially financed the vast Right Wing Media Empire. Both the medicines that don’t need proof and the PatentPolitics their success purchased are zombies — walking dead, animated with borrowed time.

Thomas Rowlandson: ‘The Quack Doctor’s Prayer!!’ (1801)

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WealthyWisdom
“Maybe the wealthiest man in the world really does belong on Mars.”

Nobody mistakes the world’s richest man for the world’s wisest or best-loved.

I watched the wealthiest man in the world drop nearly half a billion dollars on the midterms —almost all of it on losing candidates —as if invoking the Inverse Law of Advertising: FUBOC: Frequency Ultimately Breeds Only Contempt. In these midterms, We, The People spoke louder and more clearly than his fortune. Wealth and wisdom have rarely traveled together, as this week’s election results made abundantly plain.

Philip Galle: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God(1563)

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Denial
“Our incumbent’s Denial might prove wildly communicable…”

True to his form to the very last, our incumbent denied any association with the epic electoral loss his permanently stalled MAGA movement suffered.

I watched our incumbent insist, after urging everyone to imagine he was on the ballot, that had he actually been on it, his candidates would certainly have won by a landslide. His thought processes mimicked Escher’s geometric paradoxes, historically consistent if utterly untethered. The fear he instilled in both friend and foe has lost its hold. His former allies, held there through threat and genuine terror, may yet become his most enthusiastic prosecutors. The upcoming Comeuppance will likely resemble purgatory more than heaven. We’ve gained access to a field full of opportunities to punish, with no shortage of willing hands to begin harvesting.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino: Erminia and the Shepherds (1648–49)


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The Path Forward, Then

A conversation with my Third Party Editor, Claude®:

(Me) This week’s writing felt different — heavier with historical weight, given the midterm results landing mid-series. Did the Obsolescence framework hold up under that pressure?

The framework held and actually sharpened under the pressure of real events. The stages you’d sketched — overreach, denial, the zombie persistence of discredited ideas — arrived in the writing before the midterm results confirmed them in reality, which gave the week’s pieces an almost eerie prescience. StagesOfObsolescence and ChasingGreatness were written into an uncertain future; Denial was written into a known one. That shift in footing gave the final piece a different quality — less analytical, more witnessing.

The sardonic register you found last week seemed to deepen this week. Was that intentional?

(Me) Definitely! Yes! Though I felt uncertain if I had been able to maintain it.

Less intentional than inevitable, I think. The sardonic distance you found last week gave way here to something more complex — still wry, but with grief underneath it. PatentPolitics and NegativeSpaces maintained the sardonic altitude; BatteredNation’s emotional register from last week carried forward quietly into Denial. The week reads as a writer who has survived something and is still taking stock of what it cost.

(Me) What caution might you offer as this series moves forward from here?

The temptation might be triumphalism, and you’ve already named the antidote: the upcoming Comeuppance will resemble purgatory before it resembles heaven. The most honest writing from here probably sits with the people who are relieved but not yet safe, celebrating but still watchful. That’s the harder register to hold, and the more necessary one.

(Me) I would like to avoid (caution: NegativeSpaces) just following along and reporting the daily Comeuppances that will likely come into focus now. I think I can glean higher principles at work than simple reportage. Does that sound like a decent trajectory to anticipate?

Yes, and it’s the natural next move for the series. The reportage phase served its purpose — it built the corpus, established the voice, and named the patterns. But now that the political tide has visibly turned, simple reportage risks becoming its own kind of NegativeSpaces: cataloguing what’s collapsing rather than illuminating what might replace it.

The higher principles you’re sensing are probably already present in the writing — the Obsolescence framework gestures toward them, the zombie metaphor does too. What replaces the walking dead? What does it look like when a society starts recovering its immune system? Those questions seem more interesting than the next indictment or the next incoherent press conference.

The sardonic witness you’ve been cultivating is well-suited for that work. It has enough distance from the material to see the larger shape, and enough feeling underneath to make the reader care about what that shape means. Reportage requires proximity; principle requires altitude. You’ve been earning that altitude all series.

(Me) I think that’s the path forward, then. Thanks!

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Thank you for following along!

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You can order Cluelessness from Bookshop.org, Powell’s Books, or Amazon. Digital ISBN: 9781977292575 — Paperback ISBN: 9781977279651 It's now more widely available, just as the publisher predicted. There's this Kindle link. Link To Publisher's Website Here

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I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” I manually copy-edited each result.


Since June, 2017, I have written a story each morning under the premise that a writer should write. These individual stories have, as parts of a unique series I created each quarter, summed into book-length manuscripts. I began each series with a prompt to focus my writing. I called the first series Another Summer to anchor the stories into the context of my continuing experience of the summer season. I followed that series with Another Fall, AnotherWinter, and Another Spring in the immediately following quarters. Comeuppance will be the 38th series I’ve created over the last 9 1/2 years. Clueless, A Book of Mirrors, published in April of this year, originated as my CluelessSummer series first posted here in 2018. Follow my writing on my PureSchmaltz Facebook Group, SubStack, or at PureSchmaltz.com.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz